Most people have a bike; at least that is what we all thought before all the shelves were empty. We look outside and hope that we can go do an activity out there. What is the first thing that comes to mind? For the majority of us, it’s “let’s go ride a bike! It’s good for me and the environment. Win-win!” “This is not a blip. People want to be outdoors. They want to exercise and they want transportation that’s not a bus, a train, or a trolley. You give this massive issue of climate change– and consumers actually want to do something about it.” says John Burke the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Trek Bicycle Co. (Kanter, 2020)

Unfortunately, most of us didn’t have a bicycle we could ride. Thus we went to the store and we bought a bike, while we still could. You see most companies making bikes have their factories in places like China but when COVID-19 struck it left us with no factories to make bikes and restock our stores. Those factories were supposed to be making the bikes for March, April, and May when COVID-19 shut them all down.

This is why our shelves are bare. So overall we may see the shelves filled to the brim with the beloved bicycle. See the form of transportation for sale once again, but who knows? Maybe COVID-19 has shown us how desperately we need to be outdoors, maybe we will always have trouble buying a new bike because everybody wants one; that is a story for another day. What we know now Is that bikes are selling like hot cakes; maybe that’s a good thing.

Kanter, Larry. “Inside the Company Trying to Solve the Global Bicycle Shortage.” Medium, Marker, 4 Aug. 2020, marker.medium.com/inside-the-company-trying-to-solve-the-global-bicycle-shortage-eae6849a9f3b.

Ben-Achour, Sabri. “Bike Shortage Due to Disrupted Supply Chains and Pandemic Living.” Marketplace, 22 Aug. 2020, www.marketplace.org/2020/08/20/bike-shortage-covid-19-economy-transportation/.